Welcome to Shelf Help! The weekly series by @Grocery_Girl, tackling the industry's most pressing retail ecommerce questions.

Question:

"Social media manager here. This feels silly to ask but what does 'path to purchase' mean and when do I build it into my strategy?"

Answer: 

Path to purchase - sometimes abbreviated as "P2P" - refers to the path from brand.com or brand media to retailer.com.

In other words, paths to purchase bridge offsite brand media and onsite where-to-buy experiences (e.g. store locators) to the digital shelves of retailers like Target, Walmart, and local retail stores.

At Pear, we talk to a lot of brands trying to fix broken paths to purchase. These often include shoppable tools - like store locators - that aren't using daily inventory scanning, which results in customers hitting out of stock links or broken experiences when they eventually bridge over to retailer.com.

Accurate paths to purchase are especially important when it comes to paid media. If you're spending marketing dollars to send a shopper to their preferred retailer's cart, you'll want to ensure:

1. the product is actually in-stock at that retailer
2. the experience is seamless (with minimal clicks) to avoid dropoff in the shopper journey

If either of these factors are missing, you've lost your one shot at capturing the customer.

This increased importance on frictionless experiences is why many brands are moving to shoppable tools that not only scan inventory daily, but can integrate that technology directly into the ad unit to eliminate extra steps.

‍Pear Connect by Pear Commerce creates "mini where-to-buys" within the ad units on all major platforms. Proprietary technology scans inventory daily to ensure the most up-to-date retailer data, serving the product and retailer combination that's most likely to be selected by shoppers in each geo. Plus, Pear Connect reduces the path to purchase at retailer.com down to a single click, creating the customer journey with the fewest number of clicks: